The Uncivilize method is designed to gain clarity, imagine ways for personal and systemic change and explore how to make them real
How do we break free?
The change we need is deep, and all-encompassing. Many of us grew up as consumers in our capitalistic culture. It shaped the way we look at the world. We live and breathe its values, and reinforce them everyday in the way we eat, learn, care, rest, create, and work together.
How can we possibly change a global system, that is so deeply engrained in us?
Where do we even begin? Where do we find the energy, in a system that is designed to exhaust? That makes us believe our only power lies in our role as consumers? And that creates the illusion that we need to solve it all on our own?
Seeing What Modern Life Hides
Four modes of living
Uncivilize works with four fundamental modes to organize life: Wild, Domestic, Local and Global. These are not stages of progress. They are different ways of relating to energy, work, ownership, and community. All four exist, most of us simply live inside one more than the others.
wild
A simple way to understand what mode something belongs to, is by asking: how many steps stand between you and what you consume? Once you begin counting, the modes clearly reveal themselves.
Take something ordinary: an egg.
In Global mode, an infinite number of invisible steps separate you from the hen that laid them; the technologies to control the feed systems in the automated facilities, financial markets, packaging technology, logistics, retail…
In Local mode, buying from the farmer's market reduces that distance considerably, and some connection to place and community is restored.
In Domestic mode, the chickens in your backyard have names, you care for them daily, fostering direct responsibility.
In Wild mode, steps approach zero. You find an egg, you eat it.
Four Vital Spaces
Distance does not only affect production. It reshapes these four vital spaces:
Inner-Space: Beliefs and values that drive how you show up in the world.
Living-Space: Daily life: home and habits, tools and skills, products and practices.
Environmental-Space: Physical surroundings; the natural and build environment.
System-Space: Abstract structures; culture, policy and law, that shape society.
By dominating these four spaces, Global mode has displaced the other modes. It shapes inner-space by imprinting a narrative of growth and self-interest. It transforms living-space by commodifying daily life; turning care, food, and skill into products and services. It degrades environmental space through extraction of resources from nature, and labor from people. And system-space is shaped to support industrialization, privileging scale and growth, leaving Local economies struggling to compete. A single mode occupies what once allowed the others to thrive.
Process
The process begins by recognizing how our inner space is shaped by Global mode, our dependence on it, its dominance over modern life, and its consequences. We use the other modes to create space by remembering that our history and ingenuity run deeper, and by reconnecting with what makes us feel alive.
Used as lenses, the modes bring alternatives into view that we would normally overlook. Life, work, and exchange can be reimagined through Wild reciprocity, Domestic craft, or Local resources and networks. As the lens shifts, new possibilities begin to surface.
Synthesis is where the modes meet. Global logic is not discarded, but repositioned from extractive to supportive, through knowledge sharing, funding, legal structures, science, and coordination. The regenerative capacity of Wild systems, the skill and care of Domestic craft mixed with Local community engagement and combined with the insight and coordination power of Global tools result in concepts that move beyond any single mode, creating forms of value no one mode could deliver alone.
As projects deepen, these concepts are tested against environmental space: does the surrounding context support them or resist them? They are also examined in system space: which policies, norms, and rules enable or constrain their development? This reveals what must shift for new concepts to take root and endure.